Bill Hand: Weather, religious beliefs drove settlers to New Bern

If you will Google it you will soon discover that we are definitely, maybe, possibly, going into a mini-ice age. This is due to the probability that the sun is slipping into a sun-spotless period. Apparently, no sun spots equals really cold weather, and so we all should appreciate the sun when it has SSA (serious solar acne).

If you will Google it you will soon discover that we are definitely, maybe, possibly, going into a mini-ice age. This is due to the probability that the sun is slipping into a sun-spotless period. Apparently, no sun spots equals really cold weather, and so we all should appreciate the sun when it has SSA (serious solar acne).

Probably you are wondering what this has to do with New Bern history.

“Surely, Mr. Hand,” you are saying, “you aren’t going to try to claim New Bern’s history somehow connects with a mini-ice age?”

Well, actually, yes, my fellow history buffs, it does. In a way, it was a mini-ice age that set the whole snowball rolling that ultimately resulted in the displacement of Neusiok Indians, the power of Governor Tryon, and the apparently never-ending dislike of Lee Bettis for Dana Outlaw.

Wikipedia, that boundless source of almost-knowledge, states our last mini-ice age happened from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It’s a very intriguing article and most of it is possibly true.

I don’t know if that underachieving age of cold was as long as Wikipedia says, but I know that Europe’s winters, in the early 1700s, makes a stay in a freezer like a week on Waikiki Beach.

The Palatines were the original hard-luck settlers. They were from the Palatine region of southern Germany. These were protestants, mainly, who’d gotten the short end of the stick during the 30 Years’ War. Primarily at the hands of the good Spanish King Ferdinand, the Palatines lost a good third of their population during the 1620s.

They were just numbly shaking that one off when the French King Louis XIV decided to become deeply devout in his Catholic faith. In those days, becoming devout in your faith pretty much meant robbing and slaughtering everyone of the other faith, and so the nearby Palatines again took it on the chin.

Then came the winter of 1708-09, declared to be the worst in the previous 500 years. It was … it was … well, let’s just say the weather outside was frightful.

Birds froze. Cattle died en masse and grapevines died, never to recover. In January the Rhine froze over, shutting down traffic for weeks. As a long-term result of that freeze across Europe, some 600,000 people died of famine by 1710.

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back … or maybe the ice that sank the Titanic-on-the-Rhine. Not knowing whether they would lose their toes to frostbite or French torturers, they began to flee — mainly to England where Queen Anne cast them a benevolent and Protestant eye.

Life was not easy in London. The sun may not have been setting on that empire, but the frost was. Tent cities were filling the city and Parliament was pressuring the queen to find some answers. She finally decided to send them all on to other lands that could handle a little European crowding: 4,000 pulled the short straw and wound up in Ireland where some Protestants were needed to offset the home-grown Catholic population.

Page 2 of 2 - Another 3,000 came to America. A gang of those went to New York, which had been recently snatched up from the Dutch. Others, as we all know, boarded ships for Baron Christoph DeGraffenried, who had just purchased rights to the Indian town of Chatokka — which he would rename in honor of his own home city as New Bern.

And that, you might say, is the story of the South’s first “snow birds” who came together here.